The manufacture of silicon photovoltaics is a very cost and performance sensitive industry. Standard silicon photovolaics (PV) manufacture includes screen printed silver paste to form a front grid pattern that includes “fingers” to collect the current generated over the surface of the solar cell and perpendicular “busbars” which collect all of the current from the fingers. Copper strips are soldered onto the busbars and interconnected with the busbars on the back surface of a subsequent solar cell to allow the cells in the modules to be connected in series, as shown in FIG. 1. This process is undesirable for several reasons. The metallization on the grid pattern is opaque, so it “shadows” or prevents light absorption (and so electrical generation) over the areas covered by the grid. Screen printed grids limit the size of the fingers to about 50 μm, and the busbars are generally close to 2 mm wide—resulting in shadowing of about 6-7% of the front surface of the PV cell, which significantly reduces the potential cell performance. The busbars, which collect very little current from the cell itself but primarily act as a conduit for the current from the fingers to the external contacts, contribute about half of the total shadowing of the surface.
In addition to shadowing, the interconnection of the front and back busbars requires soldering metal strips to both the front and back surfaces of the cells, which can create stresses in the very thin silicon wafers and lead to breakage. The bending of the copper strips can also induce stresses near the edges of the cells, and it requires space to exist between the cells, decreasing cell packing density and increasing the overall size of the module.